MEFTV speaks to Syntonic co-founders Gary Greenbaum and Rahul Agarwal about getting carriers into the app economy, and their three new carrier services they announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress.

“Mobile carriers are not participating in the ‘app-economy’, which is about twice the size of the mobile data business and growing substantially faster,” said Gary Greenbaum, Syntonic CEO. “With Syntonic’s new platform services, we can now provide carriers, content providers and advertisers with full out-of-the-box solutions to generate new revenue streams from engaged mobile subscribers.”

“We started by enabling content partners the ability to sponsor their apps – essentially make it risk-free for consumers to download and use them, data-free,” said Rahul, Agarwal, CTO, “Now we’re extending that capability and enabling sponsorship for any website, which is really revolutionary because we can do this without any changes to the network, browsers or website. It just works.”

Agarwal continued, “Our new Captive Portal solution enables mobile carriers to generate revenue from customers who have zero-balance data accounts. These customers can now become a revenue opportunity for carriers. Carriers can now offer ad-supported access to select mobile Internet apps, websites and content. We also provides access to advertisers through any ad network.”

“Finally, our mobile commerce component – we now have direct carrier billing and integrated wallet that enable flexible payment models such as subscription & single-item transactions and in-app purchases.”

CEO Greenbaum joined other industry leaders on the MEF Future of Business Models panel :”It was a very engaging panel that represented a pretty diverse subset of the ecosystem,” said Greenbaum. “It really did cut across the major themes that Syntonic is part of, mobile advertising, mobile commerce and content monetisation – so we were really in the middle and forefront of a lot of the discussion. I think we’re all in agreement that the time is now for the carriers to recapture a lot of the opportunity lost to the OTT players, the Googles and Facebooks, with existing technologies offered by Syntonic today.”

Watch the full video below.